Union coalition wants new contracts at six plants

By LULADEY B. TADESSE / The News Journal

The DuPont Co. is under attack by some of its own workers.

The DuPont Council, a coalition representing 1,800 workers at six DuPont plants, including the Edge Moor site in Delaware, is sponsoring an advertisement campaign designed to embarrass the company by exposing its environmental problems and efforts to outsource American jobs to Asia. The campaign has included signs on Wilmington-area buses and a banner flown over NASCAR crowds in Dover earlier this month.

The council is composed of the United Steelworkers and the Paper Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers unions, which recently merged. They are hoping the negative publicity will prompt the company to negotiate contracts at all of their plants. Half of the unionized plants, including those in Edge Moor, Buffalo, N.Y., and one in Louisville, Ky., are without contracts.

"We decided as a group this is the route we are going to take because of DuPont's unwillingness to negotiate with us in good faith," said Gary Guralny, president of the DuPont Council, based in Buffalo. "DuPont tends to be sensitive to public opinion -- they spend a lot of money for public relations -- so we tried to expose them for the company they have become."

For the past three months, the unions have been running ads on 18 DART buses throughout Wilmington with variations of its message: "DuPont: Creating Environmental Disasters," "Outsourcing Our Jobs to Asia," and "Manipulating Pension Funds."

The ads so far have not helped to open up discussions with the unions.

"It is just another tactic the union is using to publicly embarrass the company and its employees," said Leslie Beckhoff, spokeswoman for DuPont. "It's a tough time of change and we are working very hard to be a global competitor, and this sort of thing distracts us from what we need to be doing as a company."

Beckhoff said the union has been using similar tactics since April 2003.

Union officials would not say how much the campaign has cost. The cost of the ads on the 18 DART buses is about $3,000 a month, according to Delaware Outdoor Advertising Inc., which rents out the space on the buses. The union plans to run the ads for at least three more months.

Levi King, 53, of Wilmington, who uses DART, said he sympathizes with the workers. "DuPont has been around for a long time, and they have been getting away with a lot," said King, who works at a warehouse in New Castle.

Earlier this month, the DuPont Council also took its message to the NASCAR races in Dover, where DuPont is the sponsor of four-time Winston Cup Champion Jeff Gordon. An airplane flew over a crowd of more than 200,000 with a banner that said DuPont puts "U.S. jobs and environment at risk." About 100 union members at the event wore T-shirts with a similar message.

The union also made its presence known at a Daytona Beach, Fla., NASCAR event this year with a pickup truck driving around with a "DuPont Endangering America" billboard.

DuPont has been undergoing major changes since 2003, when it announced major job cuts and a shift in "the center of gravity of this company" toward faster-growing overseas markets such as China. The company's employment in Delaware has shrunk from about 26,600 in 1985 to 8,100 today. Recently, union workers also have had to pay more for their health insurance and benefits.

"It is obscene to say they are a company with the highest ethical standards when there are 100 members here that have not had a raise in the past three years," said Carl Goodman, who heads a steelworkers union in Louisville.

Bernd Schmitt, marketing professor at Columbia University Business School, said it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of the campaign against DuPont.

"Generally, it depends on what the reality of what the company is actually doing and how controversial a topic it is," said Schmitt. "The company has to be careful. It needs to explain its actions, especially nowadays."

DART rider Lorean White of Wilmington has mixed feelings about the ads.

"It is a very good company to work with," said White, who worked at DuPont in the 1980s. "Without them Wilmington would be in bad shape."

However, White, whose son is a union member, said workers need to have unions.

"You need unions to do things because the cost of living is going up," she said. "A lot of people claim they would do better if they had a union."

Contact Luladey B. Tadesse at 324-2789

For more information please e-mail Gary Guralny & Shawn Gilchrist
Last updated 11/20/2006